Tag: Nokia Beta Lab

Both OVI Maps, our maps and navigation client for S60 and the Maps on Ovi companion website (or MoO!!! as we refer to it internally), received a few upgrades in the past week. Maps 3.0 is a solid upgrade with lots of good new features that you will probably want to install if you are still using Maps 2.0 on your Nokia phone. Maps on Ovi is the website that goes along with it that features such niceties as synchronizing routes and pois from the site to your phone via OVI as well as a new Find Places feature, which is what me and my colleagues have been slaving away on for the past few months (particularly the places bubble that shows up on the map for some POIs).

Our Find Places feature is at this point still a quite minor feature and the whole site is of course still in beta with lots of known issues and rough edges that are still being worked on at this point but improvements are coming of course and the site is actually perfectly usable at this point. Last Monday was the big 1.0 for our team and our first real publicly available feature set, which we will be building on in the near future. Getting it out was stressful and part of my work in the next few weeks is helping it become less stressful.

My personal technical contributions are limited to the content provisioning from various vendors such as Lonely Planet and WCities. You can find the same content also in the Nokia Here and Now client for S60, which is currently in Nokia’s Beta Lab, as well as on the device if you buy any of the premium content packages.

For the past few months I’ve been working with lots of highly talented people slaving away on all the frontend and javascript stuff as well as the pretty neat and cool server-side architecture. I can’t really reveal anything on that except to say that cool stuff will be coming from Berlin. So keep following us on e.g. the Nokia Youtube channel where our marketing people regularly post stuff, including videos featuring me and another one featuring Christian del Rosso that I reported on here earlier.